Fireflies like loose jewels shaken from the boots
of Zeus envelop me under this full moon, float
and bounce. Midnight wander on a summer solstice
eve around the old asylum grounds, and sky trips

heat lightning like cupped hands lose water, a voice-
less glimmer over the cemetery. Sunken, the name
plates here mimic stepping stones that in a misplaced
memory once led somewhere: a screen door, a pond.

Under the witness moon, a boy I knew hanged himself
in a barn; eastern sunlight, he’d told me, heals plants,
heals people. This solstice breaks like early morning gloam.
The way, during an eclipse, day tinkers at becoming night

this night has an inkling of day, an idea of luminance.
I imagine, as the moon dissolves in my throat, I learn
about phases, the pull and draw of the tides, about
hiding in the blue sky and being called a lesser light.

It is September of 2012, at a hostel in the center of Medellin, Colombia. I am writing my graduate thesis after a year in London at the Central School of Speech and Drama. I skype with a colleague who is volunteering for The Freedom Theatre in Jenin, Palestine. She is teaching voice for their acting program and mentions that once her time is up, they want to continue to have voice training.

“Are you interested in going to Palestine for three months?”

My gut says yes. But I know I cannot afford to volunteer.

I know little about The Freedom Theatre. Part of my desire to go is precisely that—that I don’t know—that I would learn something new. The Freedom Theatre offers to pay me a stipend equivalent of what Palestinians earn. They offer to pay my travel and housing during my stay as well.

Yes

While preparing for the trip I learn that The Freedom Theatre works towards creating an artistic community in the northern part of the West Bank. They offer a space in which children, youth and young adults can act, create and express themselves freely and equally. They offer a chance for young people to imagine new realities, challenge existing social and cultural barriers, and bring positive change to their community. I read about the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. I read fiction and nonfiction. I try to prepare myself, but the truth is that even after reading articles, novels and essays, I still don’t really understand what the conflict means.

Working with the Great Salt Lake is a landscape of lines. There are wake lines, wave lines, debris lines; and the landscape can be read just like a poetic line. Moreover, because the line is physical, you can inhabit the line. You can be physically present inside of language.

: here is the oil drum of my failure,
the slick, the seep.
Here, I have come to lay it down.
A harvest would be good only for asphalt
and anyway, this is a place for walking;
I will take my 80 steps alone.

Here is where I come to lay it down.
Here, lay it down:
the kitchen furniture from your childhood,
your horse’s bit,
all your lumber and sinew.

We only partially erode – the metal will corrugate itself, the wood splinter,
the diagnosis yellow
and curl.

Get on with it now
y’ auld blatherskite.
Aren’t we that sick of lookin’
at each other for forty years.
Twenty thousand cups of tea together
enough
to flood the vale of Slievenamon
enough
boiled spuds chomped
to feed a legion of Black and Tans.
A bit of quiet ’t wouldn’t be a bother.
’Tis your moanin’ in Belial’s night
I cannot thole.
Hurry now.
Tear through the blue light.
A lamb needs to be suckled . . .

Dig the peat from beneath
his ragged nails and file them smooth.
Air the upper room, the crocheted spread.

’Tis a pity to bury him
in his store-boughten suit
when the Devlins down the lonen
go threadbare through the bog of a Sunday.

I can no thole your tears, child.
’T were no saint he.
His long silences hogged my light.
Dust on chintz curtains. Draw well
water for tea. Fetch a porcelain cup.
Arra, Cushla, hush,
save a sup for him.
’T weren’t it he that was always starved
with the cold.

Editor’s note (revised April 2014): Everything You Touch was originally commissioned by True Love Productions and premiered at Boston Court Theatre in Pasadena in April 2014. A full-length play written in three parts, the first of those parts, as presented below, was published in the 2013 edition of The Labletter.

Playwright’s note: Throughout the play, the CHORUS OF MODELS will be used as furniture, wall-paper, lamps, decor, often in a humorous way. But let it be noted— when not parading around the imagination of JESS or in a literal fashion show, they are ever-present objects, to be objectified at will.

PART ONE: FUCK YOU FUCK YOU

JESS appears in her office. She clutches a LARGE SCRAPBOOK. It’s chunky, filled with scraps of fabric, drawings, pieces of metal, etc. She is lit by the glow of her computer screen. LEWIS hangs over her shoulder. Both wear drab clothes. They are colored sickly beneath the fluorescent lights. THE MODELS are the desks, the chairs, the bad art on the walls.

JESS (to us): I hit the down arrow on my keyboard hard several times. I am aware the force of my finger is excessive but I am still meekly satisfied by this minor gesture. With my other hand I raise my coffee mug to my lips, knowing the coffee is terrible cold and also knowing it was terrible when it was hot. The wetness reminds me I am not made of pixels and page hits. I am capable of feeling wetness. I am human. [to Lewis] Okay. The overview is fine. The ‘scope of work’ is fine... You spent a lot of time on this.

I can hear their eyes following me through
the mist. The scale-skinned escapees
from eras past. I envy their endurance, their
desire to thrive far surpasses my own. I whisper
a tentative welcome. Search
for the response . . .

Blink.

Blinkety Blink.

Blink.

Blink Blink.

Blue Blink.

Blink . . .

[a long uninterrupted silence ensues]

Blink.

Blink.

B-B-B-Blink.

UnBlink.

Back Blink.

Blink.

Blink Blink Blink.

[a distant clock clicks . . . once . . . twice]

Blink.

The brilliant lights of my phantom fellowship bless
me. I wade deeper
into the water

This poem is about a swamp where I fly fished into my twenties. A true swamp, it nevertheless had an open feeling. The light coming into the darkness was like shafts of light in European cathedrals. The water was dark, but not muddy. The green trout were really small mouth bass, but the locals called them “green trout.” Moccasins would plop off a limb and aggressively swim toward the pirogue we fished from. I killed many with the paddle. The fly bait was a wet fly (black gnat) we used with a very tiny spinner and trailing a sliver of cat-gut. No fly fisherman ever uses a spinner except in the Southern Louisiana swamps. The most an alligator would let us see were two black nostrils, just above the water line. After we cooked the bass late in the day and ate them, we took small wooden stools down by the water, sat, listened to the silence.

Damask waterfalls cascaded down
the windows
to a jigsaw puzzle
floor of wooden blocks
that kept me busy on melting summer afternoons.
Outside, the challi waala1 hailedfor us to come out and buy his
sand-baked
cobs of
amber.

I walked out to the jharoka2
and looked down at my grandfather on his wicker charpoy3,shelling green peas
into a silver bowl that tossed
the Indian sun back at me,
wrapped in a starched dhoti4which he favored over the suits
that were choking
inside the many closets
of this haveli5,one of several that he gave away.